How this portal works
What each part does, what it asks of you, and what happens to what you give it.
Reading
Everything is public and nothing requires an account. Browse filters by language, state and theme, and separates two things most archives run together: told in is the language the story was heard in; readable in includes languages it has been translated into. A Santali story with an English translation appears under both.
Adding a telling
Add a telling asks for the story, the language, and who you heard it from. Most of the rest is optional, but the provenance fields are what separate this from a folder of text files, so they are worth filling in.
- Who told it — the relationship (a grandparent, a neighbour, a gathering) is required; the name is not. A name only saves if you tick the box confirming that person agreed to be named, and you can withhold it entirely.
- Where and when you heard it — district level, never finer, and the year if you remember it.
- Licence — CC BY-SA (reuse with credit), CC BY-NC (non-commercial only), or community-restricted for material that should not travel freely. You keep the rights; the licence is your choice, not the site's.
It publishes immediately. Nothing waits in a queue — but the entry will say plainly that nobody else has attested to it yet.
What the status line means
Every telling carries one of three states, computed from the record itself rather than awarded by anyone:
- Unverified — one person contributed it and nobody else has spoken up. Most entries start here, and there is nothing wrong with it.
- Community-attested — people in at least two different places have said they know this story. The page names the places, because two attestations from one district and two from opposite ends of the country are not the same claim.
- Source-cited — the telling is linked to a published collection.
These are not quality scores and they do not affect where anything appears. They tell you what you are looking at.
“I have heard this too”
On any telling you did not contribute, signed in, you can record that you know the story — with where you heard it and in what language, and optionally a note on how your version differs. That note is often the most interesting thing on the page.
You cannot attest to your own entry, and the site records one attestation per person. This is not a vote or a like: it is a second data point about where a story lives.
Translations
Any reader can machine-translate a telling with the language button, and any signed-in reader can write a translation by hand. Both are stored as records in their own right, with the translator credited — and a machine translation says so, in those words, with the engine named. If nobody has checked it, the page says that too.
This matters more than it might sound. The languages these engines handle worst are exactly the ones this site exists to carry, so an unchecked machine rendering of a folktale is a draft, and calling it anything else would be dishonest. A translation you write by hand is worth more, and is credited to you rather than to software.
Pictures
You can attach an image to a telling you contributed. It is resized in your browser before it is uploaded, which also strips the EXIF metadata — the block where a phone writes the exact GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken. That removal is deliberate: this site records location no finer than a district, and it would be absurd to be careful about that in a form field and careless about it in a photograph.
Every image needs a short description, so that a picture is not simply missing for readers who cannot see it.
Reporting a problem
Every telling has a report link at the bottom, and it needs no account and no name — the people most likely to need it, the family of a named teller, will not have one. Leave an email address only if you want a reply; it is used for that and then deleted.
Reports go to a person, not a filter. If one is upheld the telling is withdrawn, which deletes the text, the teller's name, the place, the year, the pictures, the translations and every past revision. There is no undo, and nothing is quietly kept.
Accounts
Signing in needs an email address and nothing else — no password, ever. You get a link, you click it, you are in. There is no password to steal because there is none to store, and the site holds no third-party login.
Accounts are for adults. Under-18s have specific protections under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act that this site is not equipped to honour properly, so younger contributors should submit through a parent or teacher's account rather than their own.